Likely it would keep learning. Presumably by taking out the trainer software, you would defang it entirely and it'd be about as useful as a google search. You know how the AI in fighting games often have unfair frame advantages over human players? Well, to keep it viable, they'd have to have to do the opposite: and make us have constant advantage over the AI. It's possible, but eventually you'd get sick of that.

It would vary per game, too. For a board game like Chess or something, that's not a big deal, especially if you can "reset it" for new people coming to the house or something, because a starting difficulty might have the thing unfairly smart against new players. But for fighting games? It'd be cool if it could fight like human opponents, but eventually the calculation speed that it could make decisions and choose the best moves, it wouldn't be good.

To be fair, though, that'd make for great AI vs AI battles to test balance of individual characters. Don't render the fights, just take the wins vs losses and factor in how much of the entire arsenal of moves was used. You could do some amazing balancing that way.

I think the main point is there are more good games out there than you will be able to play in a lifetime. the rest can rot.

I think it's a bit much to expect steam to filter out all the good stuff from the crapware, to be honest. Remember, that's what the market's supposed to do, but steam essentially became the entire gaming market. The front page of steam is no different form the court of popular opinion that existed before steam. Crapware is easier to make with game maker and such, but half the time those people using gamemaker are programmers who are just too lazy to make their own version of game maker. Your average maker uses these tools because they're in a hurry and/or are lazy. So if you want a stable-unrushed project, ask on the boards for a list of files in the directory. It'll give the gamemaker games away right away.

I think the big picture the OP is triyng to give us, and this is worth looking at, is that the established giants that we know and trust are taking advantage of our knowledge and trust, so we're having to go back out into the wilderness of junk to try to find new people to turn into giants whom we can know and trust. This cycle is annoying, but it's nature.

I don't. Have enough staff to give at least 1 hour per game submission to determine if the game is total crap, works or not, and other details. Valve is too lazy. If there is a minimum level of quality then such low level shovelware won't be attempted because they know they won't get on. There are some games that are literally empty, and the trading cards are worth more than the game itself, for a really bad trading policy...

With votes perhaps. But the front page of 'new games' only had 10 slots. Not that i care too much.

I don't mind game maker or RPG maker as long as the game works and seems good. There's a lot of people who can't build games from scratch.... including me. But given a framework you can make something. But i suppose the real question on that front is if you have money to make new sprites so it isn't the first thing they attack. for 'default sprites'. I'm not sure i could afford a few hundred dollars to pay an artist for art and sprites, unless i was really dedicated to it all.

I think more people need to grow a spine and when new unwanted practices start rolling out, you nip it in the bud before it makes any traction. But that's me. I still haven't paid for a single micro transaction or loot box on any game, mobile or PC.

If a game company is going to go to the trouble of doing this, why not have an option to actually render the battles, so that players can watch it play out? Would be a great opportunity to include a 0-player mode.

(Back in the day, I had fun with this sort of thing in Tetris Attack, which has an option to have the player be AI-controlled instead of player controlled; if you tried to beat the story mode this way, you would, instead of the ending, get a message instructing you to turn that setting OFF.)

Basically, what I would most expect from better AIs is:

- avoiding stupid mistakes
- avoiding erratic behavior, instead having long term goals and following them
- and most importantly: character

I want AIs that behave distinctively humanlike like some AI could be treacherous, the other one timid and avoiding conflict unless it's really necessary, the next one rushing into fight without thinking about consequences. In a way simpler than real humans and quite predictable, but also interesting and easy to relate to.
That actually makes a nice stance to rally around. Count me towards this group. I never did that and I really don't feel like I will do it anytime soon.

I agree with this, but all depends if the rich casuls will stop buying their crap.

Couldn't agree more. Not having any kind of actual vetting process done by actual staff smacks of sheer laziness and cheapness. When TB and Jim Sterling reported on how Valve was pushing an increased reliance on algorithms to solve the problem of "Fake Games" on Steam (instead of actually trying to remove all of the Fake Games), I realized that they simply didn't care at all about anything anymore.

Right, you want the AI to be humans in the game world, not controlling humans with a controller. You want the world to be alive, not an overcompetive computer that will sacrifice pawns willy nilly to force you into the open.

If you had staff trying games and updates, things would end up like here on gog, where games you think are great wouldn't get approved, and games that need updates wouldn't get them. How do i know? 'Cause that's actually what the problem is here. But that's the basic idea. Steam is basically a model for the free market, except consumers have much less righs. If you publish for the PC, you publish on steam. That's the rule, anymore. I had many cool game ideas, even started to work on some of them. Gave up halfway through most of them, because I knew I had no way of separating myself from the crapware market. Steam itself never entered my mind, especially because some projects were before Stream. Steam's only the problem because of DRM. Being able to sort crap from decent, well, that's a problem we have to figure out how to solve properly. Playtesting for an hour or two isn't going to work, especially when you have a number of titles that are known to suck in the beginning, but otherwise be great titles. Then you'd also have a huge number of people who make the game only long enough to playtest. Moreover, it'd be to the curatior's discretion. Sounds good on paper, but reality is different. Absolutely, which is a good way to filter out the crap without buying it. If you see the default sprites, move on. Unless you have a disability in the hand, anyone can draw to a reasonable, and even crappy art is better than the default. But there inlies the problem: the total lack of work while expecting a huge profit return. This is why people attack these game making programs, but the truth is, it happened before, anyway. These programs merely help people skip a few steps. Honestly, i hate the programs because they create bloated games that probably would have much, much lower requirements if hand coded. But, without things like Unity, we wouldn't have those nice games like Tangledeep, and, well, 10% of the games we actually play and enjoy. One of the games I'd recommed to people most on android is also a unity game. These tools are junk, but they do allow for rapid development, which helps alot. I agree, but they don't. They love their sims games too much. They love their MMOs. Here's one great example of absolute crap that i've seen people playing: Dead by Daylight. It's a game where you have 4 shmucks running around trying to run from any given famous movie monster. People pay so much for that game, the DLC, but it's exclusively online, no single player, and you know it's eventually going to go down, either from boredom, or just movie companies trying to recind their contracts just so they can make a new movie without advertising the game again. There's surely lots of other games out there like it, but people play it because you can chase people down as Freddy Kreuger, some pig from Saw, an extremly naughty nurse zombie, the killer from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. That, and their favorite youtuber gamers who endorse the game for money. I've seen my girlfriend get on the damn game simply because she thought she'd end up getting recorded by this one youtuber who was live streaming on Twitch at that time, despite the odds that she probably wouldn't be one of the incredibly unbelievable number of people that actually play that crap. They can't even balance the game properly, so they had to make in game rules (no camping, etc) that you report each other for violating (and, as far as i can tell, it gets trolled hardcore with false reports that get taken seriously). I said I never would, but then i did. Stay off that high horse. You'll just hate yourself even more when you inevitably cave to "it's only a dollar."

"State of what? State of California? I know where the fuck I am Jack."

They usually do have these modes, though. The idea is you would do what i say to try to simulate 1000 matches for a particular matchup in a very, vey short period of time just to see if there are balance issues. Games are really, really unbalanced these days.

Who said anything about updates? I meant for getting the initial game on.

Let's assume you get a game on steam, let's say the company is Rockstar and the game is GTA 3, alright? The game looks decent, it plays, it has the files it needs, it isn't utter crap, and you have fun for an hour. You give it the thumbs up and steam eventually approves it.

Then there's a game, like oh i don't know... Grass Growing Simulator... it has no real game play, no depth, no content, and should probably be freeware as just a 'i did something during learning programming' thing. You deny it, because it isn't a game, it has no story, no content, no beginning/middle/end, it has nothing worth playing.

If Steam is making literally tens of millions a year, paying a few extra staff $10/hr to go through 1,000 potentially new games ($10k then) to see if it's worth putting on the platform is small change for what they would get in return. Is a $10 investment that bad while you only need to sell say 3 copies to make that money back? Valve is just lazy.


The current State of California (and their policies and results)... Now there's a can of worms.

It's been interesting reading through the different views in this thread, and it made me ponder on my own game purchases over the last several years. The last boxed games I bought were Witcher 3 and GTA 5 in 2015, almost three years ago given the release dates, which was both surprising and quite saddening when I considered that span of time.

My experience with GTA 5 was so poor, I've never trusted another so-called 'big name' AAA developer/publisher again. From memory, it took around three months before I could even play the game properly, mostly due to problems with the abysmal mess that is Social Club. The annoying part about that was once I did eventually get to play the game, it worked fine. The DRM and Social Club was the problem, not the game itself. I wasn't interested in online multiplayer either, so felt like a second-class citizen for simply wanting to enjoy the single-player game I'd paid for.

By contrast, I never encountered any problems installing, updating, or playing Witcher 3. Of course there were initial bugs, but nothing that proved detrimental to my overall experience with the game. Not having to fart around with DRM or an online connection just to play the game, was certainly a big plus. It worked, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and it was worth every penny. I suppose we could class Witcher 3 as a AAA release, but comparing the experiences I had with other developers/publishers, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

Prior to 2015 and the odd bargain bin games purchases, the only other boxed AAA release I bought was Mass Effect 3 in 2012. Overall, my experience with ME3 was fine, both with the original and the changed endings. However, I haven't bought anything published by EA since then because I didn't like how the DLC was handled. Neither Mass Effect Andromeda or Dragon Age Inquisition appealed to me anyway, partly because I'd read a plethora of shitty player reviews for both of those games, and although I loved DA:O, I hated DA2 so much that the series effectively ended there for me.

Since those last two purchases in 2015, interestingly, I have only bought games via GOG. Partly to play through some classic games that I either missed the opportunity to play years ago, or to relive the experience of games I still own, but couldn't get working on a modern system. I've also delved into various offerings from indie developers here at GOG, although my experiences with those are very hit and miss. Some are great, others are downright awful.

I do tend to make the most of sales and offers, though. There are some games I paid €5 or €10 for that felt like a waste of money, but others that I bought for about the same price, which turned out to be excellent and worth a lot more, for me. In that regard, the 'bad' and the 'good' purchases kind of balanced themselves out. However, I'd estimate that for what a single full-priced AAA 'big name' release costs these days, I've probably bought several games for the same money from GOG. Taking that into account, I'm perhaps a little more relaxed about the odd dud now and again, for what I'm paying, but maybe also focusing on what I consider to be better value for money, more so than in the past.

What really pleased me recently was being able to buy Kingdom Come: Deliverance via GOG. It's perhaps one of very few releases in the last few years that has genuinely piqued my interest, and enough pay the initial release price. Quite honestly, had it not been available at GOG I probably wouldn't have purchased it at all. I've yet to download it from my library as I'm waiting for the 1.3 patch, but I'll form my own opinion once I've played it.

Overall, my faith in the AAA games market and the big publishers is so low, I vote with my wallet. It says something that KC:D is the most I've spent on a single game in almost three years. That said, I'm not quite as choosy or particular when buying games on a whim at GOG, although obviously the fact they're DRM-free is a huge attraction, plus, I also refuse to have anything to do with Steam. Anything that has DRM or 'jump through hoops' online activation, is an instant no from me. Likewise, anything that even whiffs of having DLC that that's core to a game, but is used as a blatant cash-grab instead, well, they won't be getting my money.